The Dialectic. ‘This is a dialectic and I’m going to explain it.’
Grip imaginary six centimetre object between thumb and forefinger. Rotate wrist ninety degrees, snapping into end position. Smoothly rotate back to start. Repeat up to three times depending on conviction.
Use when expressing a shift from one thing to another. Highly infectious.

“When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius

This notion has always seemed a bit smug, but it is illuminating, so to speak. What are all the ways in which we ask specifically that the gesture erase itself? That we both gesture, and not. That we learn to mask and “internalize” gestures. Or make the gesture absolutely explicit, and then insist that it not be acknowledged. What are we learning when we learn to ignore the wise man’s finger, and look at the moon?

“Specific acts of pointing, in which people take turns deliberately making their interests manifest in a nonlinguistic manner, presuppose a backdrop in which our bodily actions regularly and without a communicative intention make our interests available to others in a prelinguistic way. In fact, deliberate teaching by pointing is something of an anomaly characteristic of modern, Western societies.” —Chad Engelland, Ostension: word learning and the embodied mind

Camel with remote control "jockey"
It is this curious sense of fascination more than the wish to build something useful or the hope for material rewards that makes men devote their lives to machinery. Constructing, operating, even watching machines provides satisfactions and delights that can be intense enough to become ends in themselves. Such delights …

Bart Huges trepanning himself, 1965. Photo Cor Jaring.
Bringing you the latest old news of perforated interiors, we find this article from Cabinet magazine, Like a Hole in the Head.
Excerpts:
"Feilding wasn’t interested in performing the operation as an extreme form of body art, but because she believed it would have a life-changing effect …

"In this Drawn Out Space"
A durational drawing performance with Jaanika Peerna and David Rothenberg at the extraordinary FiveMyles performance space in Brooklyn. Come for all or part of it. Stay to chat afterward.
October 15th, from 4-6pm.
558 St John's Place, Brooklyn

I just received your letter asking for feedback about my introductory level course. I'm so glad you found out about that, and are curious to know more. I, too, wonder what introductory course it is, and how many classes I have missed. Do you think they will notice?
But you asked about learning outcomes. I …

concerntroll ‎(pluralconcern trolls)
(Internet slang) Someone who posts to an internet forum or newsgroup, claiming to share its goals while deliberately working against those goals, typically, by claiming "concern" about group plans to engage in productive activity, urging members instead to attempt some activity that would damage the group's credibility, or …

Some kids playing with fire...
Here in Anji, China, one of the latest additions to the playground is a working oven. The kids cook potatoes. If they want. The play is self-determined.
This isn't the only place where the capacity of children to generate their own play, and assess their own risks is taken seriously. …

I'm deep in the bowels of AT&T and Apple. I've actually got them talking to each other. I feel like an extreme match maker. Increasingly senior tech people, roused from their slumbers...
Cheerful persistence in the face of polite deferral...
All I want for Christmas is for this SIM card to Validate...
After endless hours …

In his seminal 1939 book, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Johan Huizinga places play as the central element in any flourishing society. In an increasingly gamified, but also risk adverse, educational environment and culture, how are we to think the role of play today? This course will take up both …

I'll be teaching a course this summer on "Objects of Play," in the strange hope that if we looked at the things we play with, we might surprise ourselves. We'll be looking particularly at the large scale toys—ladders, oil barrels, etc.—at play in the early childhood education of Anji, China.
I am reminded of my …

On Wednesday March 11, the library hosted a guest lecture by Cheng Xueqin, regional director of early childhood education in Anji, a county in China’s Zhejiang province. Ms. Cheng presented on her work and experience in developing Anji Play, a play-driven curriculum for preschool- and kindergarten-aged children that she and a group of Anji school …

This is one of those things you need to see. Over the last several decades a pedagogy of play has been working itself out in rural China. The resonances with Western early childhood practices of learning and play are all the more striking, given that there is no direct connection. Even more interesting are the …

This article was just brought to my attention, "because it's about shoes."
"Bringing a Daughter Back from the Brink with Poems"
Is it always about shoes? Are shoes one of our primary apparently-casual-examples? Even if we aren't talking about shoes, does it inevitably insist on being sorted? The shoe always goes on in the end... …

If you are looking for a Breadth/Elective course for the Spring, “Aesthetics of Technology” will be looking at “the Shoe as Interface” as a focus this time around.
Performing an interdisciplinary examination of the fundamental role of shoes in our world, we will engage in Material Cultural Studies. Drawing on Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, Movement Education, …

Here's a nice article on Architectural deterrents to its own use.
We should perhaps dig past the obvious and proper outrage around these practices to note how architecture generates its own crevices, the attempt to modulate them a sign both of our capacity to exceed plans and the excess that every plan is to itself.
…

An excellent interview of Frédéric Gros, author of A Philosophy of Walking.
There is, it reminds me, something tricky that happens when walking becomes a thing. In articulating the thing one never talks about, we find ourselves speaking to its other. One does not just walk, in walking one is not walking but rather not …

Fall 2014, Mon 7:20-9pm
Aesthetics of Technology
A&H4089
In this course we will be looking at the aesthetic effects of interfaces—not just how they appear, but how appearance itself is mediated by the deeper influence of interfaces, often to create the very sense of aesthetics as a "surface effect." But what is an interface? How …